True Friendship: The Story of Ahu & Zeynep

In this digital storytelling project, I decided to introduce my best friend Zeynep. To be there in good times and to turn bad times into cheerful memories, Zeynep is an expert!As an emotional human being, I went through series of emotions while I am telling our story. You probably will be able to feel them. It is not possible to share the events of 21 years of friendship under two minutes, yet I tried my best. I enjoyed doing this video, I hope you will enjoy watching it, as well! 

Once again, I want to thank Zeynep for being such an amazing friend. Words fall short! 

Toontastic - an app simply fantastic!

This week I am going to introduce a digital story telling tool for iPad users which I enjoy using: Toontastic. You can create your cartoon story and share it with family and loved ones by simply using Toontastic. Not to worry if you do not have an iPad but an iPhone. You can check Toontastic Jr. Pirates out by clicking the image! That is a lot of fun, too! 

At the beginning, you see the Story Arc screen where you decide how you will structure your story, originally divided into five scenes: Setup, Conflict, Challenge, Climax and Resolution. You can re-order the scenes or add more if you wish.








For each of the sections, you choose a setting first by either selecting from the pre-designed settings or creating (drawing, taking/using a photo) your own as you would like.

The next step is choosing your characters and props. You can choose from templates, draw your ProtoToy or use your own photo. Yes, you can be the hero/ine of this story as well!

1-2-3 Action! After deciding on the setting and characters, now it is time to animate your characters and vocalize them. Place, scale and rotate your characters as you wish and then click “Start Animation”. Move, animate and vocalize your characters, and when you are done, press “Stop Animation”.

Music is very important for realizing the emotion; therefore, you may want to choose a piece of music for your scene. Decide on the mood of the scene and level of the mood. Happy or ecstatic? Surprised or shocked? You can pick the most suitable one!





When all your scenes are finished, you give a it a title as well as adding your name. Now it is time to enjoy your story that you directed!

Toontastic promotes imagination and it can especially be used with young learners efficiently. For example, the students' task is to change the ending of a well-known story or add to it, in groups of 3 or 4. They pick their favorite story and continue the story after the “they lived happily ever after” part. First, they write their stories and to make things more cheerful they can use Toontastic! They will be using their creativity and working on their pronunciation, in addition to producing written texts. New settings can be created as the characters move in/out and travel around. They can introduce new characters; characters may get old or fat… It all depends on the creativity of the students. 

Below you can watch my sample cartoon. In order to show as much settings and characters as possible, I used irrelevant settings (I even drew one of the settings!) and characters and there is no story in general. I hope you will enjoy it!

Please let me know if you use this app in a different way, because I really like it and I want to use it productively in classrooms.

You can also watch the trailers of Toontastic and Toontastic Jr. Pirates: 

To find out more about Toontastic and actually download it with iTunes, please click on the icon below! 

Duolingo – Learn English with Duo the Owl

This week I want to introduce you a very useful website for learning and practicing English: Duolingo – a free science-based language learning platform. The teaching method heavily depends on translation. While translating from and to your native language, you learn and practice how to pronounce and spell the words and to form sentences.

Taking your native language –or another language you are competent- as basis, Duolingo gives you the option of learning various languages, besides English. For Turkish speakers, it only offers English courses, but German will be added soon. For English speakers, Duolingo has more languages to offer. For example, I use this site to learn Spanish and refresh my Italian. Interestingly, in the near future it will even be offering fictional languages like Dothraki and Klington.

Duolingo was created by crowdsourcing pioneer Luis von Ahn, PhD and Severin Hacker, PhD and was launched in January 2013. Today, it has a community of 20 million users. More than 20,000 of these users applied to be volunteers for contributing the process of creating language courses. Due to its strict selection process only 3 to 5 bilingual contributors can work in the creation process.

After you choose the language you would like to study, Duolingo gives you the opportunity to start from the beginning, or to take a test to determine your proficiency level; you continue accordingly. You set yourself a goal to reach each day and your coach reminds you to come back if you do not show up for a few days. It keeps track of your progress, as well as motivating you to reach your goal.

For demonstration purposes I chose to learn English as a Turkish speaker and I began with Basics 1 as you can see in the screenshot below. In addition to providing hints and notes to help you understand the topic, Duolingo offers test where you translate words or sentences from Turkish to English and vice versa, listen the phrases and write them down, fill in the blanks and pronounce the words. It may seem like a piece of cake at the beginning, but trust me; it gets quite tough as you progress.

I really like using Duolingo and find it very useful for learning a language. There are a couple of reasons why I chose Duolingo, among the other language teaching sites. First of all, I can use it on my smart phone when I am stuck in traffic on a bus or on my computer. I set daily goals and I try to keep up with them, or get an e-mail from Duo, reminding me to study. Both the application and the website are user friendly. What I really appreciate is that, there are no hidden fees, Duolingo is totally free.  Frankly speaking, I did not have any problems using the website therefore I do not have any weaknesses in mind to declare. I would definitely suggest teachers to recommend this website to their students to practice their English because of the above mentioned reasons. Teachers may turn the usage of this site into a challenging competition and the students may try harder to make a decent progress.

If you wish to learn more about Duolingo, you can watch the video below.